Ivy Lee
Method
You start the morning with good intentions. You check email, do whatever feels easiest, then jump to whatever shouts loudest. By five o'clock you're tired and busy, and the task that mattered most is still untouched.
What is the Ivy Lee Method?
The Ivy Lee Method is a prioritization tool that has you choose your six most important tasks the night before and complete them in strict order. At the end of each day you write down the six things you must accomplish tomorrow, ranked by importance. The next day you start at the top and work down, finishing each task before you touch the next. Anything left undone rolls onto a fresh list of six for the following day.
The method works by moving one decision to a calmer time. Choosing what matters is hard when the day is already running and your inbox is filling, so you make the choice the night before, when nothing is pulling at you. The strict order then removes the morning hesitation about where to begin, because the list already decided for you. The six-task limit keeps the plan honest, since a day holds only so much real work.
How to use it
Run your planning through five steps. You need a notepad and two minutes at the end of the day.
- At the end of your day, write down the six most important tasks for tomorrow.
Six is the ceiling. Fewer is fine; more defeats the purpose. - Rank the six in order of true importance.
Put the task with the largest payoff or consequence first, even when it's the one you'd rather avoid. - Tomorrow, start with the first task and work on it only until it's done.
No skipping ahead to easier items, no half-finishing to feel productive. - Move down the list in order, one task at a time.
Complete each before starting the next, so your attention stays on a single thing. - At day's end, carry any unfinished tasks onto a new list of six.
Then add what's needed and rank again for tomorrow.
Worked example
It's the evening before a day off, and your head is full of chores. You write your six tasks for tomorrow and rank them: file your taxes, fix the dripping kitchen tap, do the week's grocery shop, call your mother, reply to the landlord about the lease, and sort the overflowing wardrobe. Taxes go first because the deadline is near and the cost of missing it is real, even though it's the task you most want to put off.
The next morning you start on the taxes before anything else, and finish them before you let yourself touch the tap. You work down the list in order through the afternoon. By evening you've cleared the first five, and the wardrobe sort rolls onto tomorrow's list without guilt, because the five things that actually mattered are done. The hard task got handled first, which is the part most days never reach.